***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/ *****

As Carter mentions,

>Allport and Postman's old stuff.....there has been relatively little
>systematic empirical work since
> > >> on that particular problem, although there is a great deal of work on
> > >> related issues in network diffusion (both empirical and theoretical).

here are some additional interesting (and also rather old) cites.
The Campbell article is particularly good, as it gives an overview of
systematic biases to be expected in transmitted information due to
the interesting peculiarities of human cognitive and social systems.

- Brissey, F.L. (1961) "The Factor of Relevance in the Serial
Reproduction of Information" The Journal of Communication 11:211-219
[Results of experiment where successive generations of subjects read
and wrote descriptions of a film and answered T-F questions about
content.]

- Campbell, Donald T. (1958) "Systematic Error on the Part of Human
Links in Communication Systems" Information and Control 1:334-369
[ Survey of literature and interesting discussion of general error
tenancies in communication chains]

- Greenberg, Bradley, S. (1964) "Person-to-Person Communication in
the Diffusion of News Events" Journalism Quarterly 41:489-494
[Results of a four-day telephone survey of knowledge of news stories
ranging from 'important' to' unimportant']

- Jacobs, Robert C., Campbell, Donald T. (1961) "The Perpetuation of
an Arbitrary Tradition Through Several Generations of a Laboratory
Microculture" Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 62:649-658
[Intriguing experiment on transmission chains and the effects of
group conformity on Ss reports of 'Sherif' perceptual phenomena]

- Kurke, Lance B., Weick, Karl E., Ravlin, Elizabeth C. (1989) "Can
Information Loss Be Reversed?" Communication Research 16:3-24
[Ss read previous Ss written version of a story, wrote a version for
next S. Data was collected on loss of detail and distortion as the
story was passed down the chain, and reconstruction as it was passed
back up]

There are a few more related cites at:
http://student.bennington.edu/~skyebend/BenderdeMoll01/biblo.html

;-)

_____________________________________________________________________
SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social
network researchers (http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/). To unsubscribe, send
an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line
UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.